A plant or animal that is spinose or spinous has spines or thorns; something spiniform has the shape of a spine. The grass called spinifex (Latin -fex, from facere, to make) has that name because it produces spiny flower heads.

In medicine, spino- can refer to the spine (itself so named because it has blunt projections on each vertebra) in connection with another part of the body, as in spinocerebellar, the spine and cerebellum, or spinothalamic, the spine and the thalamus. The Latin original occasionally appears as a formal word for the spine, especially in spina bifida, a congenital malformation in which one or more vertebrae fail to close fully over the meninges of the spinal cord.